1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to print job control apparatuses that control print jobs, method and computer-readable storage medium a program thereof.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, in commercial printing industries, in which orders are received from third parties (customers and clients) to produce printed materials (magazines, newspapers, catalogs, advertisements, photographic prints, and the like) and the printed materials desired by the client are produced, it is common to use large scale printing apparatuses such as offset plate printing presses. With these types of apparatuses, work advances through various processes such as manuscript input, design/layout, comps (presentations based on printer output), proofing (layout corrections and color correction), press proofs (proof printouts), plate making, printing, post-processing tasks, and shipping. This is because making plates is unavoidable when using the above-mentioned printing presses, and once plates are made, making modifications to them is not easy and is considerably disadvantageous in terms of cost, and therefore careful proofing is essential in tasks such as layout checks and color confirmations. As a result, extensive equipment is required in these tasks, and to a certain extent time is also required to produce the printed materials that the client desires. Moreover, specialized knowledge has been required for these respective tasks and the know-how of a person proficient in the tasks has been necessary. However, in recent years, there have been improvements in the quality and performance of digital printing machines used to respond to small quantity and quick turnaround jobs, and these digital printing machines are being widely adopted in the printing industry. As a result, in recent years there have been an increasing number of cases in which users of offset printing presses have been adopting digital printing machines. Consequently, rather than constructing separate workflows for offset printing and digital printing, there is a growing requirement to construct a workflow (hybrid workflow) in which the use of printing machines is divided according to factors such as delivery times, quality, job size, and costs.
In the case where a printing enterprise is adding digital printing equipment to an offset printing based print workflow system to construct a hybrid workflow system, it is necessary to give consideration to differences between offset printing and digital printing such as those indicated hereinafter. In offset printing, multiple pages (for example, eight pages per side) are allotted and printed on a large sheet of paper. Further still, after printing, multiple post-processing processes are separately necessary for finishing. Furthermore, generally a special-purpose post-processing apparatus is used for each of the post-processing processes. Accordingly, a special-purpose job ticket is assigned for the offset printing press and each post-processing apparatus. On the other hand, in digital printing using a multifunctional peripheral (also called an MFP), it is possible to use standard size papers (for example, A4 and A3), which are smaller than the papers in offset printing. And such devices are capable of carrying out printing for each page and sorting pages into single lots, as well as carrying out simple finishing processes (such as half folding, zigzag folding, cutting at specified thicknesses (number of pages) and specified positions, and stapling up to specified thicknesses). Accordingly, knowledge and experience are required of an operator for considering the above-described differences (for determining whether or not to use the MFP's simple finishing processes for example), which undesirably increases the operational burden of the operator. Accordingly, a workflow system is desired that is capable of automatically inputting the print jobs used in conventional offset printing as they are into a digital printing workflow.
Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2005-324553 describes a print control device in which print job commands for processing a print job are obtained, and a determination is performed as to whether or not the obtained print job commands and default print job commands stored in a memory are matched. When not matching is determined, the print control device replaces the default print job commands with the obtained print job commands. Furthermore, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2005-260332 describes an image formation support device that performs electronic trimming by calculating from the file sizes layout information such as imposition of TIFF format image file data generated in RIP processing and placement positions of each page. After electronic trimming, this image formation support device aligns the vertical orientation of the pages and changes the arrangement of the pages that have undergone electronic trimming in response to collation instructions or face-down instructions when there are such instructions.
However, the method described in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2005-324553 presumes that all print commands are available in a single print job, and therefore no consideration is given to a point that instructions are necessary for each press, which is an intrinsic feature of offset printing. For this reason, when inputting a print job of an offset printing workflow to a digital printing workflow, it is necessary to reset the print job containing instructions for multiple finishing processes for multiple post-processing apparatuses. Also, in the method described in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2005-260332, in order to input an offset printing job to digital printing, large sized sheet image data that has undergone imposition for plate-making is disassembled electronically and the imposition settings are converted. Consequently, it is necessary to perform the conversion so that the image data is made suitable for digital printing. However, in order to carry out this conversion, consideration must be given to the differences in post-processing processes (finishing processes) during offset printing and digital printing, and an operator cannot easily change these.